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You play back your own voice note. Wait. Who is that? Bad news: that is the voice everyone else hears. ninebrains.app
Your Body

Why your recorded voice sounds wrong

You play back your own voice note. Wait. Who is that? Bad news: that is the voice everyone else hears.

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The aha, in writing

  1. Your voice reaches your ears through the air, the same road it takes to everyone else’s.
  2. It also travels through the bones of your skull straight to your inner ear, a road only you get.
  3. A microphone picks up only the air road, and for most speech sounds, between 1 and 2 kHz, the bone road made up most of what you hear of your own voice.

Reinfeldt, Östli, Håkansson, Stenfelt. Hearing one’s own voice during phoneme vocalization: transmission by air and bone conduction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2010.

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